I’m presuming that The Irishman director Martin Scorsese wanted to de-age Robert De Niro and others in a way that was significantly more realistic than the Michael Douglas de-aging in Ant Man and the Wasp.
I actually had no problems with the Douglas de-aging, but then I’m not really familiar with how good or exacting de-aging technology can be these days. It’s advanced significantly, I’m guessing, over the last five years.
BTW: A major film festival announcement regarding Scorsese and The Irishman is imminent. I’m not the only one who’s been presuming all along that Scorsese’s period crime film would premiere at the New York Film Festival (9.27 to 10.3) because of his longstanding friendship and alliance with NYFF honcho Kent Jones. But who knows? Perhaps another festival or two will figure into things. Just a matter of sitting tight.
Highway tolls are collected via E-ZPass (created in ’87) or by throwing coins into a metal bin. Human toll-collectors — people dressed in some dull gray uniform whom drivers literally hand coins to — are still around, I guess, but not, I would guess, for much longer.
Back in the pre-automated ’70s manned tollbooths were fairly common. On the Connecticut turnpike a red traffic light would beam as you approached the toll station. You would come to a halt, hand over 50 or 75 cents to the guy/gal, the light would turn green and you’d gun it.
One dusky evening in ’77 I was approaching a West Haven toll station on the Connecticut turnpike. I was driving my slightly dusty 1975 LTD station wagon, which always got lousy gas mileage. I realized a mile out that I didn’t quite have the full 50 cents, and I had no cash in the wallet. I was counting the coins as I approached…a quarter, a dime, a nickel and six pennies…no, seven pennies! Three cents short. I sure as shit wasn’t going to pull over and accept some kind of traffic summons for being three cents light…c’mon. So I decided to be Steve McQueen in The Getaway.
I pulled up to the booth and handed the guy 47 cents. I started to inch forward as he was counting and saying out loud “35, 40…hold on, hold on.” I hit the gas and the guy freaked — “Hey, wait a minute, whoa!” There was no gate so the red light and the violation alarm (ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!) would have to go fuck themselves. I was Clyde Barrow after a bank robbery.
The booth guy went into fury mode…”Hey, hey…stohhhhp!…whoooaaa!” I looked in my rearview as I pulled away. The guy had stepped out of the booth and onto the road, standing in a half-crouch position…”whoooaaa!!”
I contemplated my situation as I drove away. I had just broken Connecticut state law and didn’t feel good about that. But there was something a bit wrong with that guy. I wasn’t a criminal. It wasn’t like I’d given him 12 or 13 cents or something. Who screams and shouts over a three-cent shortage? Within seconds I’d completely shorn myself of guilt over shortchanging the state, and decided that the toolbooth guy…that howling uniformed goon…was the asshole in this situation, not me.
Did the toll-booth guy get my license plate? (This was before the era of instant photographic capture.) Would he put in a call to the state police, telling them to pull over a young long-haired guy in a brown LTD wagon? I considered getting off the turnpike and driving for a few miles on local roads, just to be safe. Then I realized how loony-tunes that would be. The toll-booth guy was just an oddball freak, a lonely guy without a life or a sense of cosmic balance. I stayed on the turnpike and all was well.
But that haunted feeling of being a lawbreaker on the run is still with me.
Tatyana and I were in the second row during yesterday’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood screening. Five or six seats from the left-side aisle. Just before the lights dimmed four 20something chatty casuals — two dudes, two pretty girls — sat to our immediate left. “Troublemakers,” I muttered to myself as they were chit-chatting from the get-go. They’d stop for a while and then resume. Delightful.
About 90 minutes in the guys got up and left for a long stretch. (What kind of moron leaves a major hot-ticket film for 10 or 12 minutes?) Then the girls started talking again, and suddenly I’d had enough.
I leaned over, eyeballed the main offender and said, “Would you mind not talking, please? Thanks.” She responded with an eye-roll look that said “well, if you want to be an asshole about it, I guess we could stop talking, yeah…I mean, if you insist…God.”
Then their boyfriends came back, and maybe five minutes later the women were yapping again. I looked over at the loudest of the two and gave her a look that said “really? I asked you nicely before and you’re talking anyway?”
The guy next to me saw my expression, felt the vibe and said “calm down…calm down.” A part of me wanted to go all Don Logan on his ass, but my death-ray look had been sufficient, I felt, and I wanted to stay with the film.
Then the calm-down guy, having decided that my facial expression wasn’t chill enough, said, “Jesus, you’re gonna make a thing out of this?” He hadn’t been around for warning #1, of course. At the time he and the other guy were probably chit-chatting with each other in the men’s room.
The women were the main culprits. In my humble judgment they were (and probably still are) nothing less than Don Logans-in-training. Incapable of basic empathy, listening only to their own whims, appalled that anyone would suggest that they consider the feelings of others.
I’ve pasted a bold X next to those 2019 Toronto Film Festival films that I believe will actually matter (or aspire to matter) to persons of consequence, and will presumably stick to the ribs. Tell me what I’m missing or should pay closer attention to.
TIFF World Premieres (i.e., not going to Venice and Telluride):
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (d: Marielle Heller) X Blackbird (d: Roger Michell) X Dolemite Is My Name (d: Craig Brewer) X Greed (d: Michael Winterbottom) The Goldfinch (d: John Crowley) X Harriet (d: Kasi Lemmons) Hustlers (d: Lorene Scafaria) Jojo Rabbit (d: Taika Waititi) Just Mercy (d: Destin Daniel Cretton) X Knives Out (d: Rian Johnson) The Personal History of David Copperfield (d: Armando Iannucci) X True History of the Kelly Gang (d: Justin Kurrel) Western Stars (d: Bruce Springsteen) X While at War (d: Alejandro Amenabar)
TIFF North American Premieres (going to Venice but not Telluride):
Ema (d: Pablo Larrain) X Guest of Honor (d: Atom Egoyan) Joker (d: Todd Phillips) small x The Painted Bird (d: Václav Marhoul) X The Laundromat (d: Steven Soderbergh) X Weathering With You (Shinkai) A Herdade (Guedes) No.7 Cherry Lane (Yonfan) Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye)
TIFF Canadian Premieres (going to Telluride):
Ford v Ferrari (d: James Mangold) X Judy (d: Rupert Goold) X Uncut Gems (The Safdies) X Motherless Brooklyn (d: Edward Norton) X Portrait of a Lady on Fire (d: Celine Sciamma) X Pain and Glory (d: Pedro Almodovar) X
Going to Venice + Telluride + TIFF :
Marriage Story (d: Noah Baumbach) X
Not mentioned in TIFF announcement</u>:
Ad Astra (Venice rumored) X First Cow (Venice rumored) The Aeronauts (Venice rumored) X Against All Enemies (Venice rumored) X Queen and Slim (d: Melina Matsoukas) X Little Women (d: Greta Gerwig) X Wendy (d: Benh Zeitlin) X A Hidden Life (d: Terrence Malick) X Nomadland Lucy in the Sky (d: Noah Hawley) X Waves (d: Trey Edward Shults) X Falling (d: Viggo Mortensen) Ammonite (d: Francis Lee)
Sometime in the late summer or early fall of ’93 I did a Movieline interview with Leonardo DiCaprio, when he was 18 or 19. He had recently done What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?m but he’d shot up since and was rail-thin and sharp as a tack in conversation. We did lunch in The Grill in Beverly Hills, a noisy place favored by agents, producers and lookie-lous. I remember sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate while saying to myself, ‘This kid’s got it…I can feel the current.’
Now Leo is 44 and goateed and filled-out (the string-bean physique disappeared 20 years ago) and talking about how Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is a bit of a dinosaur enterprise (shot on film, intended for theatres, invested in physical sets and a certain kind of classic filmmaking), and I’m slapping my head as I realize that this guy who was the age of a high-school senior in ’93 is identifying with the old guard…he’s saying “wow, the world is changing but I hope we can keep making this kind of film for people to see in theatres,” etc.
It’s one thing to hear an older GenX or boomer-aged person lament the way things are going with streaming and whatnot, but to hear a relatively young guy like Leo say this…well, I’ve said it. Leo will be 50 in five and 1/3 years.
If you want a short, flavorful, totally on-the-money taste of what watching certain portions of David Crosby: Remember My Name may (or may not) feel like, please watch the below video. Produced by Rolling Stone and titled “Ask Croz,” it’s just four minutes and 24 seconds of Crosby answering fan questions. What makes it whoa-level is the naked, quietly scalding, take-it-or-leave-it honesty, which is almost always abundant from Crosby but in this instance is also present in the questions.
Like a 16 year-old girl asking about her fear of death and existential gloom. Or a person worrying about a family member, incarcerated on a “bullshit” drug charge, being able to handle prison life. Or a guy who’s angry about the fact that when he and a musician friend are competing for the same girl “she always goes home with him.” Or a general question about fundamental values and what it all feels like to have death patiently waiting on your doorstep.
This warts-and-all candor is also what makes A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe’s documentary (Sony Pictures Classics, opening today) such a profoundly rich and transcendent film.
I’ve said this over and over but it really is the shit, this film. A lion-in-winter reflection piece…hugely emotional, meditative…about the tough stuff and the hard rain, about hurt and addiction and rage and all but destroying your life, and then coming back semi-clean and semi-restored, but without any sentimentality or gooey bullshit. An old guy admitting to each and every failing of his life without the slightest attempt to rationalize or minimize. Straight, no chaser. And hugely cleansing for that.
This movie, I swear, delivers one of the best contact highs I’ve ever experienced. By the end it makes you feel lighter, less weighed down, even if you’re 18 or 37 or whatever. We all have stuff churning inside, and we all need catharsis. It’s very rare when a film offers you this for the mere price of admission.
So the catty-watties in Tom Hooper‘s Cats (Universal, 12.20) are their own species — cat-human hybrids that don’t much resemble their cousins who cavorted in the popular stage show. Small and lithe with cat ears and whiskers and tails, but darting around on their hind legs and dressed in leotards. And no claws. More of a mocap than a costume-and-makeup thang.
Flatline reaction to Francesca Hayward‘s Victoria, I’m afraid, and a mild shrug for Taylor Swift‘s Bombalurina and Idris Elba‘s Macavity. If anyone owns it, it’s Jennifer Hudson, I suppose. I immediately recognized Judi Dench (Old Deuteronomy) and Ian McKellen (Gus the Theatre Cat). I wish I was allowed to say that James Corden and Rebel Wilson play fat cats, but that era has passed, I’m afraid. Their characters are named Bustopher Jones and Jennyanydots.
The title of this post was stolen from a 7.18 trailer review riff by N.Y. Times contributor Bruce Fretts.
Any thoughts you may have had about Jerry Bruckheimer and Joseph Kosinki‘s Top Gun: Maverick possibly dealing subtle cards and not necessarily using sledgehammer tactics are now…well, let’s just say that hopes along those lines are temporarily dashed. If this just-released teaser is any kind of indication, I mean.
San Diego-based fighter pilots!….the aura of studly military rock stars, coping with buried anger and the burden of expectations, brusque and strapping and throwing their heads back in laughter while playing piano in a honky tonk. (Like Miles Teller‘s son of Goose Bradshaw character does in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip.) And the women who both love and compete with them. With the big climactic test of skill and character looming. And so on.
I haven’t read the script (co-authored by Peter Craig, Justin Marks, Christopher McQuarrie and Eric Warren Singer) but the tip-off is a Wikipedia description of Jennifer Connelly‘s character — “a single mother running a bar near the Naval base.”
A single mother! Running a bar! Who dispenses sage advice while mixing a killer Mojito! With, I’m guessing, a possible age-appropriate interest in Tom Cruise‘s Maverick, who’s now a creased and weathered Naval flight instructor. And perhaps, in keeping with the theme of launching the new generation, with an aspiring fighter-jock daughter? Or am I pushing too far?
I want a scene in which Cruise tells Connelly that Kelly McGillis‘ Charlie Blackwood left him for another woman, and then (beat, beat) Connelly tells Cruise, “Yeah, I know…it was me.” Or: “I’m sorry, that’s tough. (beat) She left me too.”
Ed Harris to Cruise: “Captain…what is that?” Jon Hamm playing some kind of tough nut. And Val Kilmer back for seconds. All the young dudes of the original Top Gun are now in their late 50s and early ’60s.
Best shot in the trailer: Crew-cutted Cruise riding a motorcycle without a helmet, bathed in magic-hour amber, loving the wind and grinning the grin.
Cruise’s six career-best roles (in this order): (1) Vincent the assassin in Collateral, (2) the titular Jerry Maguire, (3) Joel Goodson, the U-boat commander of Highland Park, (4) Charlie Babbitt in Rain Man, (5) Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, and (6) Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia. Honorable Mention: Mitch McDeere in The Firm.
“I recognize that in reality, there is a widespread discrepancy amongst my industry that favors Caucasian, cisgendered actors and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to,” Johnasson said in a statement after her views were misrepresented, she claimed, in an interview with As If magazine.
In the As If piece, Johansson said that she continues “to support, and always have, diversity in every industry and will continue to fight for projects where everyone is included. [But] as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job. I feel like it’s a trend in my business and it needs to happen for various social reasons, yet there are times it does get uncomfortable when it affects the art because I feel art should be free of restrictions.”
In a 7.3 HE piece called “Ciswashing” I assessed the criticism that Johansson was getting at the time for wanting to play real-life trans massage parlor owner Dante “Tex” Gill in Rub & Tug, a crime drama that would have been directed by Ghost in the Shell helmer RupertSanders.
“The trans-twitter community apparently feels that only a real-deal trans actor should play Gill (who transitioned from being a woman to a man),” I wrote. “They presumably regard Johansson’s casting in the same light that Native Americans probably saw the casting of Henry Brandon as ‘Scar’, the Comanche villian in John Ford‘s The Searchers (’56).
“Let’s back up and consider how this could have been avoided. Actors in top-tier Hollywood films are typically cast by producers and directors with two goals in mind — (a) find the most gifted actor to play a given role for the benefit of the film, and (b) preferably an actor with name recognition among the hoi polloi, in order to help boost ticket sales. So in a perfect world Johansson would have declined and Sanders would’ve found a gifted trans actor instead…fine. But who would that be?
Posted last year by HE commenter “Adam”: “This is just the latest outrage from ScarJo. She played an alien in Under the Skin for crying out loud when every single person knows full well she’s from Earth. And then there was The Other Boleyn Girl nonsense in which we were expected to believe she was British royalty! I mean, you can’t make this stuff up! And don’t get me started on her Black Widow character…I’ve seen her try martial arts in real life and it’s all totally fake — she can’t fight for shit. So I’m glad someone finally called her out for the fraud she is.”
Here‘s what Deadline‘s Mike Fleming and Peter Bart had to say about p.c. Stalinists a la Donald Sutherland in the final shot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Which Mike Pence realizes, of course. So he stands there with his arms crossed arms and that frosty look on his face…okay, I’ve seen enough, later. And without decent facilities those poor guys are filthy and sleeping on cement.
“I know several titles locked for Telluride,” he says, “and I don’t think you mention any of them, not even the right Netflix one. Actually there may be two.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re telling me that none of the hotties I listed are going to Telluride as far as you know?”
I don’t care what this guy is saying — at least two or three of the films I mentioned (Ed Norton‘s Motherless Brooklyn, Jay Roach‘s Fair and Balanced, Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet, Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted, Steven Soderbergh‘s The Laundromat, Gavin O’Connor‘s Torrance, Roger Michell‘s Blackbird, Rupert Goold‘s Judy, Tom Harper‘s The Aeronauts) have to be Telluride-bound…c’mon.
He also commented about Jeff Sneider‘s prediction tweet about Melina Matsoukas‘ Queen & Slim and Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Just Mercy being possible Best Picture favorites, along with my inference that admirers of these films will represent “an anti-Green Book, authentic-black-experience pushback vote.”
“The Academy is not looking to ‘make up’ for Green Book,” he says. “They strongly endorsed it and still do. Queen & Slim sounds interesting but it’s about a black couple (played by Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith) killing a white policeman and going on the lam. Universal plans to [try to] cover that up largely by selling it as a love story.”
“Warner Bros. is considering Just Mercy for an awards run but it is aimed more directly at MLK weekend. WB has so many possibilities, most notably Joker, so we’ll see. Like Green Book it’s an inspiring true story.”
Just Mercy is a variation on Call Northside 777** — a “get a convict out of jail because he’s innocent” drama. The director is Destin Daniel Cretton; the costars are Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Eva Ansley.
** Yeah, I know — Call Northside 777 who? It’s a 1948 James Stewart docudrama, based on a true story about a Chicago reporter who got an innocent guy out of jail.
Unusual Dispensation: As the following is one of my favorite HE Plus essays over the last few months, I’m offering it for free as a special HE promotion. Feel free to click through:
I became an amateur stage actor between ’75 and ’76. I was living in Westport, Connecticut. My big move to Manhattan was about a year and a half off. The usual nocturnal distractions prevailed, of course — carousing, partying, movies. I also wrote program notes for the Westport Country Playhouse Cinema. And I acted in front of paying audiences. First I played the timid “Dr. Spivey” in a Stamford Community Playhouse production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which I mentioned to Ken Kesey when I interviewed him in Park City in ’98 or thereabouts), and then a macho backwoods type named “Marvin Hudgens” in a Westport Playhouse production of “Dark of the Moon.”
